Verizon: You Can’t Upgrade Your iPhone Early After 20 Months Anymore

Even as companies like T-Mobile try to loosen the restrictions and obligations you sign up for when you get an iPhone, Verizon is tightening them up. The nation’s largest wireless carrier has just announced that they are ending their early upgrade eligibility program, which allowed customers on a two-year contract to upgrade their devices every twenty months. Instead, you’ll have to wait until your contract expires.

In alignment with the terms of the contract, customers on a two-year agreement will be eligible for an upgrade at 24 months vs. today’s early upgrade eligibility at 20 months. This change aligns the upgrade date with the contract end date and is consistent with how the majority of customers purchase new phones today. The first customers impacted by this change are customers whose contracts expire in January 2014. As always, customers may purchase a new phone at the full retail price at any time.

In other words, want a new iPhone early? Verizon’s going to stop taking a break on you and letting you get one by signing up for a new contract four months early. Instead, they are going to bleed you dry for that extra four months worth of iPhone subsidy fees, even though you’ve already effectively paid off the phone; if you want a new iPhone, tough noogies, you’ve either got to wait until your contract’s up or buy an unlocked iPhone at full price.

Shitty, to say the least. And what Verizon tends to do, AT&T can usually be expected to follow. How long until AT&T ends 20 month eligibility for early upgrades too?

About the author:

John Brownlee is a Contributing Editor. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.

RobGcf

I will most likely be leaving Verizon when my contract is up this October anyway. It depends what the other deals are out there, coupled with what the iPhone 5S offers (if it’s worth trading up from a 4S). IMO Verizon is pushing customers away. They’ll figure it out eventually, but right now they’re just being pricks.